Reactionary men of science try to frighten us, however, by maintaining that the energetic use of any of woman’s strength is contrary to healthy and efficient motherhood. They go on making these assertions, in spite of the fact that women who live a laborious life, provided they are not starved or neglected when they bring forth children, do it with far greater ease than women who live in luxury and idleness. They talk of metabolism and the necessity of a young girl storing up nourishment during the years of her adolescence, as if a human creature were nothing but a chemical factory and warehouse rolled into one. By the persistent and wilful neglect of the mind, they are able to arrive at the most astounding conclusions, and one wishes one could send them back half a century to the nursery of those days, and make them learn that “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” It is not only idle hands, but idle hearts and minds that are a danger. If a girl’s mind is caged and her education concentrated upon sex, it is not mothers you are rearing, but lunatics, deficients, hystericals, and anæmics. The people who talk as if a girl should be trained from childhood up for motherhood, quite overlook the very real possibility of tiring out the instinct before its time of fruition. There are very many girls who would have had quite a healthy and natural fondness for babies, but who have had the feeling literally worn out by premature exercise or by sentimental pawing. A girl-child is not a small woman, and just as we should all disapprove any attempt to make “little fathers” of the boys, so we should disapprove the unhealthy endeavour to make “little mothers” of the girls. If there is something pathetic about the small girl drudge, stunted with carrying about heavy babies, there is something peculiarly offensive about the prim little girl who rebukes her brothers for tearing their clothes or dirtying their hands, when she ought herself to be likewise engaged.